5 Things We’ve Learnt About Social Media at COCo

For the past three years, COCo has been investing more thought and energy into our social media presence, and this week, COCo hit 2,500 likes on Facebook. For an organization of our size and resources, this is a big milestone! In celebration, we thought we would share 5 quick tips that have helped us increase the success of our social media presence over the last few years.

1. Have a good reason for why you are on social media. For us, it has been really key to understand what we are trying to accomplish on social media, not least because it makes the tasks of deciding what to post a lot easier.  We’ve even created a resource for nonprofit groups to help them set their own objectives, which you can find here.
2. Pay attention to details. In our experience, it makes a big difference to take a few more minutes to do it right. The posts we rush through get less likes, comments, and interest, even if the content is good. Some examples of ‘small things’ that make a big difference for us are: 
   1. deleting the URL before we post a resource, so the link looks cleaner and shorter.
   2. making sure the is one, high quality image for each post.
   3. Writing some explanation or commentary with each post that is clear and easy to read.
   4. Planning our posts so they are a on a variety of topics and spread out, not one after the other
3. Be creative and flexible. Everything nonprofit benefits from creativity, reflection, and adjustments – but social media requires it . Sticking to rigid plans just doesn’t work: we have learnt to notice what works, what doesn’t, and adjust our strategy for the next day, not the year after.
4. Get your whole team involved. For us, there is one person who is in charge of the Facebook account- but it takes a village. Mostly, that means the whole COCo team has slowly got into the habit of taking pictures of activities and events, sending good resources on to our communications coordinator. Without everyone being in the ‘social’ mindset, it wouldn’t happen.
5. Give back. For us, our online presence is part of the service we offer to community organizations in Quebec. If all of our goals were to get people to come to in person events or hire us for facilitation contracts, our presence would get boring fast. We make sure that a good portion of our social media presence is immediately useful to the people who follow us, by making resources, starting conversations, and sharing tools.

The effort and time we have put in to our social media has paid off for COCo. It’s clear to us that people have a better understanding of what we do; that it is easier to promote our events; and that many more people are making us of our online toolbox. We had a tool go ‘viral’ this year- largely due to the quality of the tool, but also because we had created an online community that was paying attention to our work. That has been the best impetus to keep investing time and effort, because it is genuinely supporting the mission of our organization.

Of course, there are lot of things we need to improve about our social media. In the coming year, we are going to try to do more video (and find a way to do it efficiently, without draining our limited resources). This article about recent changes to the Facebook algorithm has also been a kick in our pants to get more comments, shares, and engagement on our posts.  

Most importantly, thank you to the numerous people on our Facebook community who consistently share, comment, like and give feedback on our social media- we could not have done it without you!

p.s. If you’re interested, we have a fledgling Facebook group for people involved in nonprofit communications, where we can exchange, share and ask questions. You can join it here. If you don’t already like our Facebook page, now is the time!